Chalk Marks on a Warm Floor
The children drew on the threshing floor
with a stone, and the wind took it.
She drew the same shapes in wool
so the wind would have to leave them.
On the threshing floor outside the house, once the grain was off it, the children used to draw with a soft white stone, houses and goats and shapes that meant nothing to anyone but them, and by morning the wind had taken most of it. Their mother wove a few steps away in the shade, and you can see she was watching. The field is pale, the colour of that packed earth in strong sun, and the marks across it have the quick, sure, slightly crooked look of something drawn rather than planned. Boujad weavers were never asked to repeat a pattern, and she did not.
The pile is short and close, softened by four decades of bare feet. It lives now in a white-walled flat in Lisbon, in the room where the piano is, and the evening light off the river comes in low and finds every one of those marks.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.